Elation
by Wine and Watercolour
Summary: Yamato looks upon the world with a maddened disbelief. Alienated by the tricks of his own mind, he reaches for his closest friend. [Unfinished Yamachi]
1. Killing Time

Fic Summary: A world based half on madness, half on a wild desire for truth and love - it's the world Yamato lives in, and it feels more real to Taichi than anything else. Reality is mutable, psychological, terrifying and beautiful. Yamachi

Rating: M because people eventually get naked.

A/N: This is the first fic I've written since I was thirteen, so please be nice with it. The first chapter's more like a preamble, fooling around in the characters' heads. It will quickly turn into Yamachi (starting somewhere in the next chapter), so if that's not your piece of cake, allez, va t'en, go.

It's largely psychological, just because I'm largely psychological. It inadvertently contains a shameless mini-pseudo-treatise. I just realized that quite a bit of it can be summed up by "In the Waiting Line" by Zero 7 (an awesome song in and of itself.) I should stick that in somewhere, might help coherence (if anything could). Anyway.

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**Elation**

Chapter 1: Killing Time

_Ishida Yamato_

I have always had the fierce sense that there is no truth in the superficial. This feeling is persistent and very disconcerting. It, in short, fucks with my sense of reality. Everything I say, from the beginning to the end of this story, ultimately reflects this sense of being totally disconnected from a truth that I feel to be existent (somewhere), but which I cannot find anywhere. It is maddening.

Here it is.

September 12th.

I have been waking up feeling... different.

The summer dragged on, and I spent more and more time just drifting off into these long walks that would take me all over Odiba, or losing my mind in guitar with the band, or whatever. I still saw the rest of the 'destined', though our destiny was really over. I never did talk much, and I guess I've always been a bit 'off'. Just now, I feel like nothing's keeping me in the real world.

I have this strong inclination to just... give in to something, but I don't know what.

Just a week ago, school started up again. Autumn always gives me this sense of absolute change. I shouldn't be swayed by pathetic fallacy, but the leaves falling just hits me like... everything old is being stripped away little by little. And school started. My life had that eight-to-four sur-imposed on it, and I thought that I could just wash away into that routine. Mistakenly.

Instead, I've been waking up feeling different each morning. It's not fear, it's more like a diluted amalgamation of joy and sorrow. It's like a vague prophecy that I can't quite make out. It's also like I'm feeling it with the volume turned way down on it - it's just this low background noise to everything, and it keeps me from concentrating because I'm straining all the time to hard to hear it.

My friends are these people who seem to know me, but I'm not certain anymore. I was a kid when I faced death with them, but I feel now as if I saw something there that they didn't see. Maybe it was something in myself. Like when I broke from the group, and when I fought with Taichi (we fought so much), there was a madness there that they were happy to forget about. But I knew - and I know - it was very, very real.

And as autumn drains the colour from everything, my breath feels like it's caught in my throat. It's as if I'm waiting for a significant change to happen just so that I can breathe, or speak.

This is what is in my mind as I wake up.

Although I walk through the present, I am thinking in the past, and I am waiting for the future. Three time zones. You know who I'm thinking about? Never mind.

I took a scalding hot shower this morning, but I didn't feel clean afterwards. I ate my cereal, but it didn't have any taste. And I went to school, but my friends' faces didn't hold any familiarity.

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_Yagami Taichi_

If you were going to ask me about myself, I wouldn't begin with myself. I know I act egocentric, but... I'd start with Hikari.

Or I'd start with this Zero 7 song, 'In the Waiting Line'. More specifically, the lines:

/Everyone's saying different things to me, different things to me,

Do you believe in what you see/

That kind of sums it up. But right after that, Hikari.

Hikari's nothing like I was when I was eleven. She's so together - I was all over the place. She remembers everybody's name and face - I just smiled as if I knew everybody, but I had no clue. She's got all the clues. I thought I'd be looking out for her all my life, but now it's like she sees all this stuff I don't.

Who knows. But it's like she knows things. And she's so quiet, you just want to tell her things. I can't imagine not having this girl around, but at the same time, it drives me crazy. I'm her older brother and I look out for her, but it's her who watches me whenever I'm around.

Not that I tell her things. Some of the sick shit that goes though my mind, are you kidding me? I'd never tell my kid sister stuff like that.

But I talk to her about other stuff, like our friends, and people in general. I ask her how she remembers everybody's name and face, and she tells me that they just stick in her head easily, like words stick with a two-year-old learning how to speak. Then she chides me by telling me my head's in the clouds, and that's why I don't remember.

I ask her if she thinks our friends know each other well, and she tells me she doesn't know. What did she say...

"I feel like I trust everyone, but I've never really tested that trust. I've put my life in their hands, but never my secrets."

I think it's that way with all of us. That's why I start with her, because she can pick up on stuff like that, without realizing how much it really means.

I don't tell her a lot of my secrets. She might not trust me if she knew the weird things that occupy my mind half the time. I tell myself everything, though; I could run through the whole inventory of strange and even frightening deviations that I'm guilty of, if you asked me to.

I guess it begins with this: I've played over the death of everybody - every one of my friends, and myself - in my head. I started doing it in the digital world, to help reconcile the fact that it might just happen one day. I started with Yamato - I was always so terrified he would just... die. His sullen expression and his messed up blonde head were just fixtures of life, but mentally, it was like he was in another world half the time. I don't know. I could see him jumping off a cliff or doing some other crazy thing just to save us, and it scared the shit out of me. His death felt... inconceivable, but inevitable. It was terrifying.

And so I lay down one night in the digital world, and I imagined him doing that: jumping off a cliff. There he'd be, on the rocks at the bottom, just this lifeless shell. I'd be filled with horror, and the horror lasted days, initially, but the more I thought about it, the more days I spent with the image in my head, the less horrific it was. In the end, it was just... there. And I did it with Hikari. It was just as hard; she stuck in my mind for weeks. But the horror left eventually. Then I did it with Takeru, and it took a few days. Then Sora, Koushirou, Jyou, Mimi, all the digimon. My mother and my father; even though they weren't here in the digital world being attacked, I pictured them as well. I don't know why. I kept doing it after I came back.

Well, not with everybody. When I got back, I really only imagined the deaths of myself, Hikari, and Yamato. Sometimes I would feel the need to think about the others, but it was mainly those three.

You... get to know a person in a crazy, intense way when you try to conceive of their death. It's like all the secret love you have for them comes rushing to the surface, like white blood cells to a bleeding chest wound. Your love pours out like crazy, and it hurts so much, it erases everything else there is.

I did it because I needed to feel close to certain people. I needed to understand who they were, and to remind myself of how much I loved them. I know it's a bit of an extreme way to do it, but I always needed things to be extreme before I really got them.

I needed to know who I was, and so I thought of my body, stunned, being smashed through a car windshield. You know, I felt so alive after that. Like I could do anything.

I needed to know who my sister was, and so I imagined burying her in the ground after some disease had ravaged her body. After that, every time I looked at her, it was like I could see the entirety of her person, beautiful and brimming with life. It worked.

After a while, it was just Yama I thought about.

Yamato - no matter how many times I imagined his body crashing against those rocks, I could never really believe that he was dead. Funny, because looking at him across the classroom, today, I couldn't really believe that he was alive. That, maybe, was the most horrifying thing.

You want to know what the story is, here. It's Yamato - no one's really daring to say it, but a few people are beginning to think that he's slipping into something.

I sit next to Yama all day in class, and I look over at him, and his expression doesn't tell me anything. I walk home with him every day, because he likes to walk instead of taking the train and I go with him - it's like an hour's walk - and he barely says anything. When I ask him how he's doing, he says he doesn't know. And it's not a provocation, it's not like he's giving me the silent treatment. It's like he really doesn't have a better answer. And so we get to his house, and he asks me if I want to come upstairs, and he looks at me with that clear, icy stare like he really doesn't want to let me leave him alone. I don't want to leave him alone, either. The long walks are the most intense part of my day.

I tell people that I walk home with him every day because I'm concerned about him. To my credit, there's probably some truth somewhere in that.

His apartment is completely spotless and bright, and there's almost no furniture in half the rooms, but there's always a bit of clutter (books, clothes) lying around. His clothes are always clean. The long twists of his body just look like they're in sharper definition than anything else in that place. His face sticks out like it's the only thing in focus in a blurry photograph.

The whole first week of school, now, I've sat in his apartment and done homework in the living room. I usually never do homework, but my hands just occupy themselves with the problems while I'm sitting there. I'm really listening to his silence. His dad doesn't come home until much later. It's always quiet.

Well, no, I mean, we do talk. We joke around, and we laugh at nonsense. His voice is softer than mine, and I always feel a bit loud with him. (It's always been like that, but now more than ever.) So we talk, but it's like we're not saying anything to each other. Neither of us can come up with any words, but it's like we know we're in the same boat, so... Yamato, he looks comfortable when we're there.

He throws open all the windows of the apartment, and we sit around just doing math or composition or talking about nothing, aware that each of us has something heavy on our mind, something familiar. Maybe it's like we know that it's going to come out sooner or later, whatever it is, and we're killing time.

I don't know. It's different than when I'm with other people. He's a strange person to be best friends with, and I am.

I always try to imagine what it would be like if he were gone, just to be able to throw him into perspective - to figure out what it's like with him here. It doesn't work, I can't. Just as he's half-absent in life, I get the feeling that he'd be half-present in death, and nothing would change at all. That's a strange kind of immortality, isn't it. I can't wrap my head around it.

When people know you really well, you can die and they'll remain with this static picture of you in their minds. There's no static picture of Yama, though. I wonder if he wakes up as a different person every morning. I feel like that a lot of the time, but I give the picture that has come to be myself: I play soccer, laugh with everybody, behave exactly the same month after month. During the day, I fall into the rhythm of it, and I even forget myself.

Then I remember, and I feel like I could already be dead.

Like, I wouldn't tell this stuff to Hikari. She'd worry too much. I can tell myself, though, and I do, more and more often, because I can't keep it out of my head. It's not that I ever concentrated in school, or overthought things with people - life was always easy. This feels easy, too, this sudden wanting to abandon everything familiar that I've become.

It feels like I could just let go.

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	2. Temporal Mine

A/N: Posted this as the start of a new story, but am shoving it back into this one because I can't be bothered to make it go in two different directions. This is more like chapter 1.5, and it's a bit short. I just stuck it in because it felt fitting. The next chapter's almost done, anyway. I tried to dumb Taichi down a bit at the end, but eh.

Am leaving tomorrow for three months with limited internet access  So I'll try to wrap this up nicely in the next chapter or two, but knowing me, I'll probably pick it up again as soon as I can.

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Chapter 2: Temporal Gold from a Temporal Mine

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They stood on the mountainside, screaming at each other into the wind. Taichi's skin was frozen and he could think of almost nothing but the intense biting pain that was constricting every blood vessel in his body. Yamato seemed, even in the midst of the torturous cold, to be somewhere else entirely. In his mind, he was already scaling the mountainside in search of his brother.

The air was black.

"Yamato, come back here!"

"No, Tai, I'm going. Don't follow me." His voice was drowned out by the howl of the wind.

"Yamato!"

Taichi's eleven-year-old chest constricted with sudden panic. He had sensed with horror, since he had first seen Yamato, that the boy's existence was precariously held in balance between his alien stubbornness and his terrific madness. He hysterically refused the idea of Yamato's death, but had dreaded it from the first moment he'd seen him. His pale face and long, spirit-like limbs made a ghostly image of him. And now the pale blonde boy had his icy gaze set over the snowy edge of a frozen mountain, and Taichi couldn't let his spectre disappear over that terrifyingly close horizon.

He leapt after his friend, the ice burning his bare skin.

"Taichi, you don't understand, just let me go!"

What didn't he understand? Yamato was headed for death, and with such certainty, as if there was nothing he could do but throw his life away. The gusts of wind blew snowdrifts between the two boys, obscuring them from each other's view. Taichi cried out in panic (and pain), and was glad that the wind muffled it.

He ran with renewed energy after the fading silhouette of Yamato, who trudged onward. Yamato was not impervious to the weather, and his body appeared weak, but full of tireless resolve, as if he would allow inertia to carry him forward after his muscles failed.

Taichi pounced on him.

"You have to come back, you're acting like an idiot!"

"It's not your brother out there, Taichi!"

Yamato hit him. Taichi had never been hit with such purpose before, only ever in play. He struck back angrily, twice, before halting. At this point, Yamato surged upwards with new warmth in his arms and legs, and knocked the other boy down. They tangled together, striking each other with determined fists, mindlessly hurting each other and rolling thoughtlessly over the hill -

Neither had ever been in a real fight before, where they were overcome with the desire to debilitate the other person, where there was such a vital need to pass them, where the anger overpowered them and the speed and intensity of everything overtook their rational minds. Taichi fought with his reflexes, but Yamato seemed to fight with calculation that scared the other boy. They tore at each other.

Several things overtook them, besides the adrenal rage.

First, they both experienced the illusion of being much warmer than they were before. They were both getting frostbitten, but their muscles were warm and moved with little stiffness from the cold. Even as they plunged over and over into the snow, it touched them only as a sudden shock that was soon forgotten. The warmth was not only from the sudden use of every muscle to stay the blows of the other, but was also from their bodies crashing together, and from the fact that fighting off an attacker is a great distraction from the cold.

Secondly, both of them experienced a perplexing rush of sorrow and elation at the same time. Yamato and Taichi were both vitally aware, with every blow that they received, of the idea of the death of their younger siblings. The despair that filled them poured out of them in a rain of blows. Strangely, Taichi at one instant (when thrown against an ice-covered rock and struck in the collarbone) prayed that Yamato would kill him. Yamato did not wish this once.

And yet they were elated, because in the moment of violence, all other tragedies, including their own young bodies being slowly frozen, were effaced.

Perhaps strangest of all is the fact that both of them had the intense feeling of communicating something profoundly urgent to the other - a cry against their own mortality?

Eventually, they clung together, half-dead in the snow, and made peace. As the haze of sickness and the insane rush left them, their basic instincts of self-preservation returned, and they agreed to go back to the cave. It is important to note that Taichi felt no victory in this, but rather felt as if the deaths of both younger siblings were now deep, permanant bruises on his heart, and that his blood ran thick and dark blue because of it. They both reached the cave, and sat in silent despair.

"I am sorry," Taichi said. He was deeply sorry.

Yamato didn't feel sorry, though. And so, he didn't know what to say. He just looked up at Taichi with intense concentration, and studied his young, ruddy face. It was only slightly battered, and there was no swelling because the air was like ice.

"Do you... understand why I was trying to leave?" he asked helplessly.

Taichi nodded. "I can't even imagine where my sister could be right now."

"I'm the only person Takeru has, though. I have to protect him and I feel completely powerless."

"All we can do is wait, Yama." The cavern flickered in the light of the small fire they'd built, and the digimon had curled up to sleep in the corner. They had the sense of total isolation, and once again, their eyes rose to each other's faces.

Waiting creates another world. It creates this silent space between the urgency of the initial crisis, and the inevitable consequence. If there is nothing you can do, you are ripped out of that state of urgency and placed in a vacuum outside of reality - here, there is nothing but time to kill before whatever happens, happens. Taichi, who always wrestled with his compulsion towards duty, felt ripped in half by this sudden displacement. He wanted nothing more than to flip forward in time, but instead he was held captive in this cave with Yamato, and so he performed this phantom vigil.

"We should go to sleep," someone said. It had the sound of a soothsayer's warning, as if consciousness would ultimately unravel whatever concrete reality remained.

But though they lay down together, they could not sleep - they rested, Yamato twining his arms around Taichi's stomach in an odd gesture of companionship and reconciliation, considering their confrontation. Taichi closed his eyes and allowed his breathing to deepen, but after an hour had passed, and their bodies had been forgotten, their minds began to wander once again.

"The reason that I was leaving," Yamato began, shattering the silence of the cave with nothing but a murmur in Taichi's ear, "was not only because I love Takeru with all my heart. It was not only because I believe that I'm worth nothing if I can't protect him."

Taichi stirred. He wanted to turn and face Yamato to listen to him, but they had just earlier begun to feel warm, and he resigned himself to the faceless narrative coming from behind him and being fed into his ear.

"Then why?"

"It was because," Yama continued, "of a few things. First is that I believe in miracles. I believe that sheer luck can draw two people away from certain death. Not inevitably, because we all die -" hearing this was strange and shocking to Taichi, because they were both still very young - "but sometimes. And sometimes, I would rather trust myself to an act of heroism that rested on sheer luck than to live with nothing but hypothetical situations in my head. When I believe I can do something, I just go - it more often than not fails. I just can't think of what would have happened if I hadn't tried.'

'Second is that I don't really think I could have stood the hours of uncertainty in between then and... tomorrow, or whenever we... find out..."

Taichi cut him off. "But you did, you're holding up, aren't you?"

"Yeah. Thank you for stopping me."

"Really?"

"Yeah. If... if I am so determined to protect Takeru, then I should trust when someone's that determined to protect me. It's just fair, isn't it."

Taichi got the strange feeling of Yamato as a brother, both older and younger than him at once. He leaned back, pressing his body to his friend's.

They were just children, and so the gesture didn't carry much of the erotic significance that it would three years later, when Taichi would sit on Yamato's couch and lean back into his body, allowing the fair-haired boy to lace his arms around his fourteen-year-old waist much like they had just done in the cave. In the cave, it was just a plea for more body heat in the cold cave, a survivalist press towards warmth. But also, it was a gesture of understanding. And that dimension would remain tied to the movement until the next time Taichi would commit it, three years later.

_Yagami Taichi_

When I remember it, the memory freezes on this one moment. I forget everything else that Yamato said that night, but I clearly remember the way his breath felt on the back of my neck. I was just a kid, so all I could gather was that the closeness there was somehow different from anything else I'd ever felt - that was all. But looking back, it's like Yamato was... fourteen-year-old Yamato, in the guise of a child. Or someone else completely.

He was mad. Then, he was mad about protecting his little brother, or about remaining alive - I don't know. Now, his madness has become this sublime undercurrent to everything he says and does. It's just a tinge to his words. And it's not the madness of anger, it's the madness of an eleven-year-old boy who wraps his arms around the waist of the boy he just kicked the shit out of, because it makes sense.

It's beginning to make sense to me, as well. That's the thing.

I'm sitting on Yamato's couch. I've dropped the math book to the floor, and he's just talking. He's talking about a song he's thinking about writing, that he apparently can't put into words, it's nothing-talk.

I want to stretch out and lean against his torso, but we're fourteen now and that would be really, really gay.

I just want the feeling from the cave back, though. I don't know why I want that, I just do.

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	3. What Can They Show You?

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**Elation**

Chapter 2: What Can Love and Death Show You?

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_Yamagi Taichi_

"What's wrong with you?" he asked me.

I turned to face Yamato at this point, in total disbelief. He had remained almost silent all day, answering everybody in monosyllables, and falling into total silence on the way home. (The way I followed him back to his apartment every day was making the sunlit flat feel more and more like my home.) I was there to keep him company, I thought, and he didn't blink when I moved to walk with him. It's what we've been doing. He never asked. We made it back to his apartment and it took him ten minutes to speak, and he asks me this?

What's wrong with me; what's wrong with him?

But I answered: "I don't know." Because I didn't.

Ran my fingers through my long dark hair, let out an exasperated sigh, as if I were exhaling the whole day. He gave me a quizzical smile, and I stopped, and laughed.

"What?"

"Nothing, you're just sitting in my living room and it's funny because I haven't spoken to you all day."

"Whatever," I said, "I come home with you every day."

"Why?"

"We're friends," I answered without thinking. But the moment I said it, it seemed... I don't know. Completely and utterly false.

Now, I am lying on Ishida Yamato's floor. I have to figure out why it is I follow him home every day. I kept unconsciously thinking it was to keep him company, but now he's laughing at me. He's sitting on the arm of the couch, his suddenly bright eyes bent inquisitively towards me, not even pretending to read his book. His long white fingers hold open the pages, and I can't even think. I am suddenly terrified.

I just like being around you, Matt. Maybe that's it. I'm curious, but I'm just used to being around you.

(I say this.)

"Why?" he answers me. "Do you like not having to speak to people?"

He laughs at me and I laugh softly with him, disarmed. It's like he knows the answer to his own question, but he's just taunting me. I grasp blindly for the answer to "why you?"

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Yamato's body rested lightly on the arm of the couch, like he was keeping vigil over Taichi, stretched out below. The open window behind him flooded the room with light and the smell of fall. He felt like he wasn't even there.

Slowly, in his mind, he descended. He knelt, (in his mind,) by his friend on the floor and traced the line of his torso with his palm, from the hollow between his collarbones, down his sternum, to his solar plexus - and there, he rested his hand. Then, he stooped and traced the line of Taichi's jaw with his nose, from just right of his chin to just under his ear, and he kissed his jaw, and then his lips, and then his throat, and then he lay down with his torso half on top of his friend, and buried his head in his shoulder.

In reality, he blinked, and asked Taichi, "What's wrong with you?"

The reason for this was that Taichi's face had a look of uncommon concentration, and he had entirely abandoned his homework. He was biting his lip, and his dark eyes were staring at the ceiling; he looked like he was thinking very hard. (It might have been nice to just ask what he was thinking about, but Yamato just said the first thing that came to mind, what was "what's wrong with you?")

"I don't know."

Yamato smiled, they both laughed.

"What?" asked Taichi.

"Nothing, you're just sitting in my living room and it's funny because I haven't spoken to you all day."

"Whatever, I come home with you every day."

"Why?"

"We're friends,"

Taichi's face suddenly reverted to its expression of intent concentration, and Yamato suppressed the urge to laugh, remembering what he had just been thinking about seconds before. Why on earth had he been thinking about that? He'd given up mediating his thoughts. The most random thoughts just passed unabated through his head.

There's a strange thing about thoughts; they are sometimes continuous. A train of thought can run through two people like a flood of water overwhelming one person after another. Seconds after Yamato thought about trespassing whatever assumed boundaries of friendship existed between his and Taichi's nebulous bodies, the same thing occurred to Taichi, who lay less than a foot away from him. Who knows why.

Taichi, unlike the amused boy still laid out beside him, reacted with profound fear.

He turned his head to Yamato, and razed his body with his widened eyes. Everything caught him at once, the pale hair, the pale lines of skin, the washed out clothes, the laconic smile, the accusing irises, the troubling stare, the walks home from school, the silence and the furtive glances in class, the long fingers that held the book - Taichi was painfully and terrifyingly reminded of the time when he had had his first crush, Sora, when he'd lain in bed at night imagining her for months while his hands roamed his body - and it struck him that that intense first craving was completely childish and unreal in comparison to what had just occurred to him -

'Forget that,' he thought loudly. His gaze snapped back to the ceiling, and he laughed aloud.

'What an absurd thing,' he thought. And he tried to summon up another image: playing soccer at lunch, laughing with his friends, grinning Taichi, whose relationship to Yamato was that he was his friend, and who walked Yama home every day after school because his friend was going through a strange phase, and Taichi didn't want to leave him alone, silly, brave Taichi, Taichi, reduced to a reassuring headstone.

Ran the fingers of both hands through his dark hair, and the laugh subsided.

Yamato spoke from beyond Taichi's field of vision, and his voice was level and familiar.

"What's wrong with you?"

Taichi paused.

"I don't know, what's wrong with you?"

"I've just been feeling different." Yamato searched for words. "Like a stranger in my own life."

"That sounds wretchedly familar."

"Do you feel it too?"

"Sometimes."

"Hm. If we're both feeling it, then maybe it's true."

"You think we're strangers? Everybody recognizes us."

"But who is it they're really recognizing? Nobody recognizes me. The rest of the destined recognize my face, but when they talk to me, it's like they're speaking to someone who doesn't exist. The rest of the school distinguishes me, even with my uniform, but they see... an attractive mystery? Or else a quiet nobody." Yamato's words were slow and weighted.

"Maybe that's all you're showing," Taichi said in a low voice, defensively.

"They recognize you?"

"I think so."

"Who do they see?"

"Who do you see?"

Yamato almost smiled.

"I see Taichi, who used to be happy enough playing soccer and laughing at everything, but who now has been following me back here every day after school to sit in silence and do math problems because he has a lot on his mind that he doesn't want to be alone with."

Taichi didn't blink.

"I thought it was you who didn't want to be alone," he replied quietly.

And his friend just said, "I don't either."

And then they sat quietly for a little while, before Yamato got up to make dinner, and they began to laugh and to talk about nothing once again, and eventually sat together on the couch and watched films until Yamato's father came home.

_Yamagi Taichi_

So the qualifiers "half-dead" and "twice alive" are starting to absorb some of each other's meaning.

I have to drum it into my head that we're sitting here, on the couch next to him, with the windows open even though the sun is setting and it's cold… It seems absurd that we were once kids carrying out these defiant acts of violence, protecting something so much bigger than our young selves that we couldn't even conceive of it. Here we are, just heroes discarded, lying on the couch cushions next to each other watching this Sofia Coppola auteur flick on Yama's small TV.

It seems absurd to keep pretending to be Taichi-who-did-such-and-such-with-Agumon-four-months-ago-and-saved-everything. It's cartoonish.

I thought Yama was in another world. He is. I'm in my world and he's in his, but the reality of my world is quickly collapsing on me, and no one seems to notice. Those moments of total disconnect I used to feel from time to time, I'm feeling them continuously now. It's not altogether a bad feeling. It's terrifying, but it's also calming. Like a low vibrational tangle of joy and sorrow.

At this point, a thought streamed from Yamato's head into Taichi's, and pooled there.

Only where do you go from there? That's the thing, if I were to just trust Yamato and slip out of my identity into this comfortable stream of being... not quite anyone, but certainly not no one... it hurts my head. I can't wrap my head around it, but I feel like that's where I'm heading. Never the less.

I was always the leader of the group, but I never led him. I was the solid, rash figurehead, and he was a quiet phantom counterpoint. We were always friends, but there was always a kind of curious antagonism between us. I was horribly dependent, horribly insecure, always afraid that our paths would one day split apart. Those times we fought (we fought so much) and that time he broke with us, it was like he was forcing us to see something we didn't want to admit was there.

I look over at him, stretched out on the couch, a long, solid body, a yellow crown, and a... his face was beautifully familiar. It resonated with familiarity.

I was the one caught between worlds. I was stuck in the complacent world of people who could be reduced to happy images in my mind, people who never changed and always stayed comfortably the same. But my head was straying, and I was feeling uneasy... when I was stuck in the mindset of school and friends and the rest, the happy static world, it was Yama who looked frighteningly estranged. But now that I was slipping into his consciousness, allowing those pretenses of familiarity to fall, I realized that he was the only person who had remained with me.

I'd grown away from everyone else, but he'd followed me like a shadow. Every time we'd fought, every time I'd followed him home, he was... I don't know.

I felt the lines between us blur.

"Yamato?"

He looked up at me lazily, like he'd been expecting me to speak.

"This might seem like a weird question."

"Shoot."

"What... I mean... do you... do you identify at ALL with the world you live in?"

We both laughed, because it was such a ridiculous question.

"Sometimes," he finally answered. "Sometimes. I do, now."

"Why?"

"Because you asked me that question. Most of the time, nobody really means what they ask anybody. They say, 'how are you?' and they really mean 'hello'. The question's just a familiar form, but when you really look at it... it's a question that refuses an answer. It's a question that implies a one-word answer. It's a question meant to silence you. You just asked me a question and you really wanted me to answer it honestly." Yamato stopped for a second. "That doesn't often happen."

The light was dim and rested on both of us like a spotlight, casting shadows on the couch and the room but illuminating my and Yama's skin. He was still looking at me very closely. Where to start? A thread of connection had formed like dew between us, that hadn't been there before. It was like we were both intently focused on each other, and I wanted to hang onto it.

It was then that I realized the extent to which I felt completely alone when I was anywhere else in the world. Except with Hikari, maybe. My quiet sister had a way of listening to me not unlike Yamato. Only her innocence decried that I not tell her anything of the weird things in my head - Yamato's wild eyes and the slightly crazed twist of his lips made me want to tell him everything treacherous and humiliating.

And I wanted to make him stop looking at me, because I couldn't stand that feeling, the feeling of all my secrets being drunk from my pores.

"I should probably go, Yama."

We said goodbye, but the way he was looking at me, I felt like he knew with a certain satisfaction that I wanted nothing more than to get out of that apartment. And that he knew that tomorrow, I'd be right back again, and the day after, until I never left.

I turned on him as I was leaving, and I asked him, "What do you want from me?"

He laughed, and told me we 'were friends'.

I guess that means, 'wait and you'll see.'

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End file.
